Recovering a hacked Hotmail account

From time to time, I get asked about what to do if your Hotmail account credentials are stolen and is being used to send out spam. Here is a paraphrased response that someone from the Windows Live Safety team said on an internal thread, but it applies to anyone.

Here are the general steps we recommend to recover a compromised account:

If the account owner can still log in to their account:

They should immediately change their password.

They should also set up an alternate email address (Options->Account Settings) to help verify that they are the account owner.

The account owner should also run a malware scan on all the computers they use to access their account. It is possible one of them has a keylogger installed that will steal any passwords that they type.

There’s no one way that accounts get compromised. And, it’s often impossible to look at an account and say with certainty how it got compromised. In general, you can take the following steps to reduce the chances of this happening again:

Run AV scan on all the computers you regularly use

Pick an uncommon password

Never respond to any e-mails claiming to be from Hotmail/Windows Live/Microsoft asking for your Hotmail password

Be wary about logging into your Hotmail account from public computers or unsecure

I had my account shut down over christmas due to someone else hacking into it…I have have got ahold of hot mail administration. and now have a recovery number but thats not working. I typed in my old account hotmail..and then were it says password put in my recovery number but thats not working. Plz help